Jane Welsh Carlyle is well known for her prodigious letters, none of which were published during her lifetime. Her witty epistles, which Thomas Carlyle praised for "pick[ing] up every diamond-spark, out of the common floor-dust," are rooted in her domestic and social activities and as a collection provide a social history of nineteenth-century London. Jane also wrote a personal journal, a few poems, short stories, and dialogues which have been posthumously published. With the rise of feminist and epistolary criticism, Jane Welsh Carlyle's work has been the subject of increased critical attention from the late twentieth century onwards.